The
Third Week of Lent:
Purgation to Paradise
Monday
The divine summons is always a call into wilderness, a vocation to recover the life of paradise after suffering temptation with Christ in desert solitude. The Transfiguration, which was part of Jesus' desert experience, was the Father's confirmation of Christ's commitment and fidelity to his desert vocation. His perseverance led him finally to death, Mount Calvary the culmination of the desert vocation, and Resurrection the final, dramatic vindication of his desert life and sacrificial death. Until then, his disciples persisted in their blindness precisely because they refused to surrender totally to their own desert vocation.
Tuesday
The disciples were unable to see and accept all the implications of Christ's teaching in their own lives because of their unwillingness to suffer. After the Resurrection, of course, particularly after Pentecost, they were transformed. They ceased to be fussbudgets, wasting time and energy caring for themselves, now kept alive by God's love and nourished by his word and his bread.
Christ's disciples embraced the real desert, which is a long, arduous trek through purgation into Paradise. This experience begins with the free, deliberate decision to suffer; it ends with the uproariously happy surprise of being in harmony with the universe, in the glory of God's presence and incalculably in love with all that is.
Wednesday
The first and classic encounter of God and his people in the desert occurs in the vision of Moses. No one but God could have compelled Moses to do what he did. "If you please, Lord, send someone else," he pleaded. "I have never been eloquent, neither in the past, nor recently, nor now that you have spoken to your servant; but I am slow of speech and tongue" (Ex. 4:14,10). "Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and lead the Israelites out of Egypt?" (Ex. 3: 11). Moses led Israel out of the pleasurable captivity of Egypt into the relentlessly harsh desert to find God in whose name Moses spoke. In the blazing empty expanses of Sinai, Israel could not hide from Yahweh as she could in the fields of Egypt and the cities of Canaan. Israel had to be exposed to God's holy scrutiny, and, in the teeth of death, discover her destiny and rise again to God's awful summons.
Thursday
God's imperious call requires a passionate response without reservation or bargaining of any kind. Yahweh is a desert God: Israel must deal with him on his own terms. The covenant that sustained Israel and evoked the marvels of God was formed in the desert. And that's where God revealed his name and gave his law. These three central events in the history of Israel occurred in the desert.
Friday
Obedience to the divine call brings those God chose to fashion into his own people into the dreadful wilderness of Sinai. God leads the Israelites through the open gates of death into the paradise of the Promised Land. He strips them of all securities and superfluities, but by revealing his Name, he places them directly in communication with his own divine power as a source of unfailing help. The whole covenant hinges on this intimate act of personal and profound trust.
Saturday
When the Israelites failed to trust Yahweh in the wilderness, they were not simply weak; they were substituting the Golden Calf for the ineffable Name, seeking to shorten the time of suffering by resorting to human expedience dressed up with religious veneer. Nothing but the divine initiative could restore the violated covenant by reawakening in the people a true sense of their desert vocation. They had to grasp once again the meaning of their desert calling: a complete and continual dependence on God alone; and they had to face up to their terrible propensity toward betrayal and infidelity.